Discussion around 15-year-old Amanda Todd’s death is focused on bullying but she showed signs of mental illness.

Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old girl from British Columbia, killed herself. She was being bullied. The response from the government is the need for more education regarding bullying. I agree. Take aim at the bullies. Charge them with criminal offences whenever possible. Shame them in public. Involve their parents. Hold them accountable. But my concern remains with the child who has been bullied.

I don’t understand why Amanda’s mental illness has been given such short shrift. She didn’t kill herself because she was being bullied. The vast majority of children who are bullied don’t kill themselves. She killed herself because she was in the middle of a mental health crisis that should have been treated.

I have read the papers and the blogs and listened to the news. Everyone is upset and talking about bullying. Barbara Kay in the National Post wrote about the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to force Internet providers to provide the names of online bullies. Andrea Woo in the Globe and Mail reported that the RCMP is now involved and that the B.C. government will increase spending on anti-bullying education.

That’s great. But where are the cries for better mental health care? We are not discussing mental illness. I sometimes think we are avoiding the discussion by hiding behind bullying.

I have a mental illness. In my early 50s, I was suicidal. As an adult, dealing with anxiety, generalized fear, a sense of helplessness and hopelessness was difficult enough, but a child? The travesty here is not the bullying. The travesty is the below standard mental health care that contributed to her suicide.

Amanda was a textbook case study of depression. She had previously attempted suicide. She was a cutter. She cried all the time. She admitted to self-medicating with drugs and alcohol — a common response to mental illness, often the result of the pain, physical, emotional and spiritual, that comes with mental illness.

Mental illness is not a death sentence. The outcomes for the treatment of mental illness are as good as if not better than the outcomes for chronic physical conditions. I learned this from Dr. David Koczerginski, Chief of Psychiatry at William Olser Health System in Ontario, when I interviewed him for my radio series “The Many Voices of Mental Illness.”

I spoke to mental health care workers and social workers who talked about the stresses on children today, especially the problems with cyber-bullying and the experts all told me the importance of recognizing signs and symptoms of mental illness — depression — in our young people and accessing care immediately.

On Oct. 10, a day before Amanda took her life, a new report on mental illness, “Opening Eyes, Opening Minds” by the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences and Public Health Ontario, concluded that mental illness and addictions are often misunderstood, misdiagnosed and ignored, even in the health-care system.

Amanda was at the point where she would not leave her home because of her anxiety. Why was she not placed in a psychiatric unit? She would have been safe there. She would have felt protected. She would have received all types of therapies in one place — cognitive, talk, medication and spiritual issues. A multidisciplinary approach is the best. Amanda would have left with the tools needed to stand up for herself.

Perhaps the problem was lack of space. In Ontario we have a shortage of psychiatrists, especially in the smaller towns where one can wait up to eight months to see one. If you can’t wait, then you must pay, out of pocket, for other therapists or therapies. It’s bad enough that we have insufficient numbers of psychiatrists, but we make it worse by not covering the fees of other qualified specialists.

Our health-care plans must start paying for mental health care. Otherwise, mental illness will always be treated as second class. Worse, it will continue to carry a stigma. And those with mental illness will continue to dwell in silence. Amanda’s last calls for help were silent — she used flash cards instead of her voice because she no longer believed she had one.

Diane Weber Bederman is a chaplain who writes about religion and spiritual care as well as mental illness. Her six-part radio series, The Many Voices of Mental Illness, originally broadcast on CHES 88.1 last fall, is available via podcast at www.dianebederman.com.